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Suicide blonde or raven-haired. Hyperactive comic or serious actor. Flim-flam television lunatic or master movie maker. Even in Japan, his home, there is confusion about the real Takeshi. It doesn't help that he goes by two names: Beat Takeshi for the daft incarnation and Takeshi Kitano for the lofty other.

As Beat, he was one half of a television comedy duo, mad enough to dive into a river and come up with a fish between his teeth.

As Kitano, the director and elegant eponymous star of the samurai movie, Zatoichi, he was last year awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In the Japanese film industry, which produced 287 films last year and had box office earnings of $2.48 billion, Takeshi is a major force, even listed alongside the director Akira Kurosawa.

Some even suggest that Takeshi is Kurosawa's heir, citing a letter that Takeshi got from the late Kurosawa the year before his death. "I leave the Japanese film industry to you," Kurosawa wrote.

Zatoichi is a grisly samurai drama involving two beautiful geishas with murderous intent. In the West, Takeshi probably is more remembered for his serious role opposite David Bowie as the sadistic prison camp official, Sergeant Gengo Hara, in the 1983 film, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.

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More than 20 years later, the central character in Zatoichi, played by Takeshi, is a masseur, master swordsman and an intriguing presence - beyond vulnerability despite his blindness - and so cold that the temperature shifts whenever the camera catches him.

As if being blind were not enough, his peroxided hair and blood red cane (concealing a long blade) ensure that he is the most memorable player in the fight scenes. Inevitably throughout the film there is violence - limbs lost, bodies skewered and geysers of gore.

But to be fair, there's also percussion ploughing - where farmers using hoes work in time to bells - and two tap dancing sequences that have prompted comparisons with Bollywood.

"I've been asked whether the tap-dance scene was influenced by Bollywood movies," Takeshi told Midnight Eye, a Japanese cinema magazine. "But I've never seen any Bollywood films."

He says the tap dancing was more influenced by the Japanese dance form kabuki, in which dancers wear wooden sandals. And as for the violence, he claims the only ones who ask about it are foreign media.

"I'm often asked whether I like violence, but I don't think that's the case at all. If you compare my films to something like Die Hard, the death toll in my films is pretty low. But in a swordplay film, violence and deaths are unavoidable."

Apart from growing commercial success and acclaim at Vienna, not only for Zatoichi but also for his 1997 film Hana-bi, he is also arguably Japan's hardest-working show-business celebrity, hosting no fewer than five television programs each week on four networks, and also known as a painter, author, journalist and poet.

Takeshi, now 58, remains a colourful figure but not by the standards of his escapades as a younger man when he engaged in self-destructive drinking and strife with his wife and other women.

A near-fatal motor scooter crash in 1994 made him fodder for gossip magazines. At the time of the accident, friends say, he was monumentally depressed and had talked of suicide. On the night that it happened he had been out drinking with sycophantic fans when, helmet unstrapped, he ploughed the new scooter into a roadside barrier.

His skull was fractured and his face temporarily paralysed so severely that he couldn't hold a cigarette between his lips, agony for a chain smoker.

The accident seems to have tamed him, though not enough to win admirers at the Japanese Film Academy, which has never honoured him. Why? The most likely explanation is that the elites cannot stomach his other life as Beat Takeshi, the vulgarian.

During this phase, especially during the 1980s, he swore, flashed his genitals, made lewd jokes, was cruel, parodied the establishment and showed up at the studio drunk.

While Takeshi has aimed for new and more serious goals, he has had to work hard to bring his popular audience with him. On this front, Zatoichi is a breakthrough, ranking fifth in the highest-grossing films in Japan last year.

But still, his fans struggle to take him seriously and no matter what he does, many still laugh.

They cannot get Beat Takeshi - the author of a thousand gags - out of their mind. Seeing him as a dramatic actor is akin to seeing Jim Carrey play King Lear. Once a slapstick, always a slapstick. "It took me 10 years of playing serial killers and rapists to be perceived as a serious actor among the Japanese public," Takeshi says.